The European dream

Route 2016 Trieste – Sarajevo

This year, when the time comes to get together again as a flock and put our small nomadic republic into motion, we will walk through the Balkans. Our new journey will depart from Trieste, the Rice Mill of San Sabba (theatre of horrors committed during the Second World War, slaughterhouse and concentration camp for political prisoners and Jews headed to the death camps of Central Europe) and will end in Sarajevo, where the spark which triggered the First World War started and which was martyred during the recent wars that took place in the Balkans.

The 2016 walk will be a journey that intends to link these two devastating wars born in our continent with the most recent wars that took place there, to say that it is too easy and comforting to store them as something confined in a sort of dark soul of Europe, but they may become a foreshadowing of what will happen on our continent in the coming years unless radical changes happen.

This new journey will start on June 4, but the hikers will gather in Trieste on 5 to have public meeting before departure. The arrival in Sarajevo is scheduled for July 4. After a few days of rest in this city, the walkers who want to do so can take part in a peace march proclaimed by a Bosnian association, which will end in Srebrenica.

The intent and spirit of this journey will be to remember what has been smoldering in the heart of Europe, which does not seem to have learned the hard lesson and which in recent years has begun to beget its ghosts and demons. It will be to remember that what happened was not an extraordinary event that we delude ourselves can never happen again but a terrible ever-present possibility if the Europe of today, shaken by tensions and which must do more to address new forms of totalitarian terrorism, fails to make a change in terms of quality and vision towards greater political unity of purpose and if it is unable to reinvent itself. If it remains a hostage of fear, fueled even more artfully by political forces and by the cynical and unscrupulous apprentice sorcerers who arise in times like these, and who advocate a winning strategy against terrorism to criminalize entire populations rather than fight with determination and without underestimation but also with intelligence and without becoming its mirror image. If this division and weakness creates dangerous imbalances and gaps that can only be filled with increasing appetites of other powers, who can play on divisions and widen them. If it remains a hostage of national self-interest and the economic and financial tyranny that are turning it into the soft belly of the world instead of a forge-continent where a new and proportional chance of life is created. If you believe we can react to the wave of new migrants fleeing poverty and wars by erecting unnecessary walls, on an overpopulated, overheated and exhausted planet, which, because of the greed and blindness of our species and its logical and dominant structures, is going towards a situation of collapse.

This is the sentiment that animates our new path and moves our feet: that from the womb of Europe the European dream, a new Europe, can arise. We will seek contact and involvement with organizations of walkers as well as Italian and other countries’ cultural associations through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To say not only with words but also with the proximity of our bodies, minds and hearts with the prefigurative gesture of a walk that another Europe is possible and that many of us have already started walking towards it.

Anyone wishing to participate in this journey and this dream – at their own pace and for their own number of stages – can get in touch with us to get all the information needed: